Hypocrites, Left and Right

I love
hate to say I told
you so, but not
that much. Human Rights Watch reports that forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi
are not systematically slaughtering civilians, but are targeting the rebels.
Civilians caught in the crossfire account for noncombatant deaths, and
the numbers are rising: but this isn’t genocide. Furthermore, as I
maintained from the beginning, there was never any credible evidence
that Gadhafi was planning any such wholesale slaughter. Indeed, the NATO alliance has recently felt moved to warn the rebels not to target civilians.

The news that we have been
lied into war yet again should hardly come as a shock. After all, our
two-party system means that the different parties take turns doing the
same thing. Yes, but how could the American public fall for it so soon
after the Iraq debacle? Easy: you only have to fool some of the people
most of the time, and with the Democrats in office, it’s their turn
to put one over on a different audience, their “progressive” base.

They’ve done a good job of
it, so far: Kevin Drum, blogger-in-chief over at Mother Jones, has announced he’s giving up making his own
judgments, because he trusts the Dear Leader to make them for him, and
Ed What’s-his-name of MSNBC’s The Ed Show is hard-selling
the Kool-Aid to his fellow Obama cultists, bellowing and waving his
arms about in a frenzy of war-cries. This is Obama’s first overseas
intervention that wasn’t inherited from his predecessor, and if any
significant portion of the progressive coalition that elected him is
opposed, then they are keeping it under wraps, at least for now.

As for the Republicans, there
is somegrumbling in the ranks, led by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
The libertarian Republican’s resolution reminding the President of
his previous opposition to military adventures not authorized by Congress
attracted a baker’s dozen of Republicans – and not a single Democratic
vote. (For shame, Barbara Boxer.)

In any case, it’s not necessary
to pull the wool over the eyes of the Republican leadership, and much
of their base: duped by George W. Bush and the neocon coterie that lied
us into the Iraq war, they have stayed duped. The only criticism of
the Libyan adventure coming from those quarters are complaints we didn’t
intervene soon enough, and that we’re pulling our punches.

The President knows he can
get away with anything as long as he protects the real economic interests
of his coalition. The other day, he was caught
unawares honestly
describing his methodology to a group of big-time donors:

“I had
the emir of Qatar come by the Oval Office today. Pretty influential
guy.
He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle
East. Reform, reform, reform. … Now he himself is not reforming significantly.
There’s no big move toward democracy in Qatar. But you know part of
the reason is that the per capita income of Qatar is $145,000 a year.
That will dampen a lot of conflict.

“I make
this point only because if there is opportunity, if people feel their
lives can get better, then a lot of these problems get solved.”

Aside from
the breathtaking cynicism of such a remark, at a time when the US is
feigningsupport for the “Arab Spring,” the shorter version of this
presidential anecdote is that everyone has a price. If he can buy off
the labor aristocracy that is the Democratic party base, and successfully
defend their perks and privileges in an era of austerity, then President
Obama can get away with following in George W. Bush’s footsteps in
the foreign policy realm.

This is the
Faustian bargain the Kevin Drums of this world have made, without having
the courage to admit it. After all, it’s only a bunch of foreigners
who will bear the consequences if Drum’s child-like trust in Father
Obama’s judgment turns out to be a wrong call. Libya is far away,
and Washington D.C. is quite near: indeed, for these people, everything
and everyone outside of Washington is expendable if the lords of the
Beltway so ordain.

Of course,
such craven hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy is not confined to the “left”
side of the political spectrum: the right, and specifically the libertarian right, is similarly
afflicted. How else could John Stossel and David Boaz, both self-proclaimed
libertarians – the former a quasi-famous television personality and
the latter the Vice President of the Cato Institute, Washington’s premier
libertarian think tank – both agree that killing innocents is justified?
In a
presentation
given before an audience made up of young libertarians, Stossel answered
a question from a student about whether it’s ever justified to kill innocents in
wartime with an unequivocal yes: “We had to do it in order
to end World War II.” Boaz, less emphatically, basically said killing
innocents is unfortunate but often necessary.

I won’t even
bother to go into the historical evidence that proves the incineration
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary, and a monstrous war crime – I’ll just note that here are people who want to get government
out of their lives – but if that same government ends the life
of some innocent foreigner, well then, that’s okay as long as Stossel
and Boaz reap some imagined benefit.

These, you’ll
recall, are the same people who were recently moaning and groaning about
the security measures put in place at airports: according to them, it’s
horrible and a basic violation of our rights as Americans to be felt
up by the TSA’s Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons every time we have to get
on a plane, but it’s fine with them if the US goes around the world
taking innocent lives – and not a thought that the families and loved
ones of these sacrificial victims might some day come gunning for them,
for us.

America is
an empire in decline: the level of spending required to maintain our
imperial prerogatives is simply not sustainable. Perhaps we can get
John Stossel to agree to that. Yet without a moral sense that imperialism
is wrong, that we have no right to go around ordering
the world and bombing into submission those who oppose us, the Stossels
of this world will continue to wander in a moral limbo, advocating “less
government” at home and more mass murder abroad.

On the “progressive”
left and the “libertarian” right, there’s more than enough hypocrisy
to go around. Maybe it’s not the politics but the culture itself that’s
at fault. On days like this, I tend to think the cultural rot that is
the hallmark of empires throughout history has, in our case, gone too
far, and is now beyond any hope of a cure. As usual, the rot is carried
to the vital organs of the body politic by the elites, and if even the
libertarians and the so-called liberals among them are so hopelessly infected,
then where is hope? Where is “change”?

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo passed away on June 27, 2019. He was the co-founder and editorial director of Antiwar.com, and was a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He was a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and wrote a monthly column for Chronicles. He was the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo